Grimes cover story for Dazed & Confused

Vancouver, where Claire Boucher grew up, is a ten-hour flight from London. Despite the kind of schedule that would make even a workaholic wince, Claire had agreed to have me tag along with her for the weekend for Dazed’s April 2012 cover story on Grimes. On the plane over, the sun went down and rose again as I traveled through time zones. As I drew closer, the ground below began to resemble Claire’s artwork for Grimes: black and white repeating patterns peeping through the clouds.

We did the first part of the interview in a funny little secret garden in the middle of my hotel, wrapped up against the cold. It got dark while we talked and a guy wearing a tuxedo made us laugh. He couldn’t see us through the window and was using it as a mirror, preening himself.

Later that night we went to a local venue to see her friend Mike, aka Blood Diamonds, play. One of the bouncers got shirty with Claire because Mike had given her an artist sticker. “She’s singing with me,” he lied to the bouncer. “Oh yeah?” says the bouncer. And so she did, just like that.

The whole weekend flowed like that, not least because Claire is just so exhilarating to be around: warm, open and forever running off on tangents. “Have you read The Foundation Trilogy?” she asked me at one point. “In it the human race is so worried about being destroyed so they’re building this library. There is this planet of people and everyone is working to collect all the knowledge that humans have ever come up and write it down in this encyclopaedia. And that’s what the internet is. We’ll be destroyed and die and someone will probably stumble across it in 20 million years and be like, What the fuck? Time is not an issue for the universe; it’s just an issue for us.”